I Will Remember This Hand
Last week, as I sat beside my ninety-three-year-old mother, she took my hand, stroked it, and said, ‘I will remember this hand. I will remember you sitting here beside me when you are gone.’ I can scan her room in my mind because I have come to know it well. I can call up the orchid plants in the window, the Biedermeier cabinet, the chair with arms carved into the likeness of dragon heads, and the paintings and photographs on the wall. The image of our hands, hers on top of mine, and her sentences return now because I have left that room in Minnesota and am back in New York City.
But what is this phantasm of then that invades now? My memory of my mother is not a ‘copy’ of my original perception, but it has visual, auditory and tactile qualities nevertheless. I have some kind of ‘picture’ of her hand over mine and yet one of the peculiar truths about the experience of remembering is that what is ‘seen’ in the mind escapes precise description. When I make an attempt to articulate the exact character of those pictorial clouds, they disintegrate under the pressure of my self-examination. Nevertheless, this much is evident: autobiographical memories require loci. They must be grounded somewhere. The word loci evokes the ancient techniques used to sharpen recollection that Frances Yates described in her famous book The Art of Memory. To remember a long speech, an orator created an orderly sequence of emotionally potent images strategically placed in a remembered or imagined architecture. As he delivered the speech, he took a walk through those mental rooms.
Artificial memory techniques and natural conscious memories depend on some form of ‘the mind’s eye’—on imagination. The seventeenth-century natural philosopher Margaret Cavendish thought of perceptions as imprints on sensitive bodily matter, which could then be reconfigured into thoughts, fantasies, memories and dreams. She was an adamant monist. Accepting mental imagery of various kinds does not mean embracing a Cartesian dualist position about mind and body. She was a champion of ‘fancy’.
When I write a novel, I usually situate my characters in places I know well. I see these people in a room or apartment or strolling down a familiar street, not as I perceive actual people in the world but very much as I remember them. The difference between my conscious remembering and my imagining does not lie in the quality of those internal pictures but rather in my orientation toward them. I know my mother is a real person. I know my characters are inventions.
Although I have never read a neuroscience paper that referred to the classical tradition of mnemonics, research in the field has linked the hippocampus and surrounding cortical regions, sometimes referred to as the ‘medial temporal lobe memory system’, to autobiographical memory, imagination and spatial navigation. Patients with hippocampal damage have trouble remembering, imagining and moving through actual and recollected topographies. There is also strong reason to believe that memory is consolidated and reconsolidated by emotion. The anonymous author of Rhetorica ad Herennium, a text written in the first century BC, recommends ‘ridiculous, unusual, rare, emotional, or beautiful’ images to enhance recollection. We remember what moves and surprises us. Research in molecular neurobiology suggests that Wilhelm Wundt, William James and Sigmund Freud were right: memory is a dynamic process that is reorganised in light of a person’s accumulating experiences. We do not store fixed engrams in our brains and then pull them out at our convenience.
Arguably all memory images have an artificial, fictive quality. I once unconsciously moved a childhood experience that took place in my aunt and uncle’s first house to their second house. I adopted a remembered visual locus for a forgotten one, although I realised my mistake by logic, not introspection. My husband and I regularly disagree, not only about what happened to us, but about where a particular event happened. Sometimes he insists he shared an experience I am certain belonged to me alone. My story became his. Personal memories can be contagious. They are reimagined or re-remembered according to one’s needs, and sometimes they are pure fiction.
It seems to me that my mental images are as simple or detailed as is expedient. When I summon my mother’s hand and arm, I may or may not call up minutiae—the blue-green veins of her wrist that extend to her knuckles and the mottled brown spots on her skin. Do I see her veins and pigment variations perfectly in my mind’s eye? No. I could not count the spots on her hand. The picture is not a photograph, but it is not no picture either. I can walk through my childhood house right now and survey every room, not every object in every room as it was then, but my memory of the architectural layout is, I would venture, flawless.
With few exceptions, the important role of mental imagery as part of memory and imagination wasn’t questioned until the twentieth century. In Western philosophy, imagery was often understood as a mediator between the bodily senses and reason, although attitudes towards these mind pictures varied. Ryle, Sartre and Wittgenstein are all broadly credited as having attacked the notion of a mental image as an ‘object’ or ‘thing’, each one for different reasons and from different philosophical foundations. The behaviourist J. B. Watson seems to have denied the existence of visual imagery in consciousness altogether, but his was and remains an extreme view. Semantics play a primary role in these debates, as do essential questions about the mind or mind-brain, what it is, and what a particular philosopher or scientist wants it to be so that it will fit into his or her larger framework of belief.
Introspection became suspect in psychology. It is not regarded as much use in most neuroscience research either. Subjective experience remains a stubborn reality, however. Phenomenology matters. When I remember, I have a sense of seeing again. Context and language surely shape those internal appearances, however they may come about. Memory is not merely ‘decayed sense’, as Hobbes argued, but an imaginative, chameleon-like presence in inner life, and for me it is strongly related to making art. I can travel back to my mother’s room and see its likeness or something very close to it. I can remember her hand, her touch and her words because they moved me. My recollection of that moment is particularly vivid, I believe, because these days my mother forgets. Although her memories of her childhood and youth are sharp, she often forgets what I have just told her. She likes to say that she has come to rely on ‘a second brain’. Sometimes I am that second brain. ‘I will remember this hand,’ she said to me. ‘I will remember you sitting here beside me when you are gone.’ And if she forgets, I will remember for her.
My Mother’s Ocean and How it Became Mine
Before the ocean, there were stories of the ocean, my mother’s stories from Mandal, a town situated on the most southern tip of the coast of Norway, where she lived on a small mountain in a house overlooking the flat expanse of the North Sea with her parents and her three siblings in a state of nearly paradisiacal happiness, if she is to be believed (and I have mostly believed her, while acknowledging that the memories of childhood are usually coloured in the rosy hues of joy or the bleak shades of misery, and far less often in the varying greys of ambivalence), but it is certain that the salt wind blew the smell of fish and brine over the sand and rocks and cobblestone streets where my mother walked and ran and climbed as a girl and that the tales she told as a woman wafted into the minds of my three sisters and me, residents of Northfield, Minnesota, who gazed out the window at vistas of corn and alfalfa fields and low strung barbed-wire fences, behind which cows grazed and left their pies to dry in the sun, but we knew no ocean except the one that came by way of our mother’s vivid accounts, and that is how we discovered the invigorations of the maritime life without having lived it.
My great grandfather was a captain who commandeered his ship, the Mars, to the South Seas. This sentence of indisputable fact sent me into high reverie as a child. The dim figure of the Norwegian patriarch mingled with Captain Smollett in Treasure Island and the ambiguous Captain Nemo in the film I had seen at least six times before I was twelve (thanks to the Grand Movie Theater’s Saturday matinees for children): Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea. And then there was Uncle Oscar, my grandfather’s older brother, a first mate, who sailed to Coconut Island off the coast of Australia, married a Melanesian princess, and returned to Norway with that high-born lady, but he sailed to India, too, and carried home a red tea set of fine, thin porcelain as a gift for my grandmother, which my mother keeps to this day in a glass cabinet in her room in the retirement home where she now lives in landlocked Minnesota.
But my favourite stories are my mother’s intimate ones, of trips to the beach during the long days of summer when night is never truly night, but rather a deepening of blue above that soon gives way to increasing sunlight, and I see my mother’s aunt Andora in her sagging, wool swimming costume as she throws herself into the water, takes a few brisk strokes, stands up and wades toward land, but before she steps onto the beach, she performs a ritual that mystifies my mother: Andora leans over, scoops up a handful of water, and sprinkles its contents down the front of her oversized swimwear, anointing first her right breast and then her left. And I see my great aunt on another day, too, striding toward the boat that will take the family to one of the small islands off shore, when all at once the elastic of her underpants gives way, and the garment slides down her legs to her ankles as my mortified young mother looks on, but the unruffled Andora steps out of the fallen bloomers, snags the silky heap with the toe of her shoe, gives it a neat kick, catches it, stuffs it into her purse, and keeps on walking. Such are the wonders of life by the sea.
Tillie
My paternal grandmother was ornery, fat and formidable. She cackled when she laughed, brooded for reasons known only to her, barked out her sometimes alarming political opinions, and spoke a Norwegian dialect impenetrable to me. Although she was born in the United States, she never mastered the th sound in English and opted for a straight t instead, referring to tings, tunderstorms and Tanksgiving. When I was a child, she had thick white hair that fell almost to her waist. It thinned over the years, but I remember my awe when I saw it after she had unpinned her bun in front of the hazy mirror in the tiny, musty, mildewed bedroom of the farmhouse where she lived with my grandfather, who had his own even smaller room under the eaves up the narrow wooden steps. Once her hair was down and her nightgown on, she took out her teeth and put them in a glass by the bed, an act that fascinated me and my sister, Liv, because we had no body parts that could be removed at night and replaced in the morning.
The extractable teeth, however, were only one piece of an altogether marvellous being. Our grandmother peeled potatoes with a paring knife at what seemed to me the speed of light, hauled loads of wood, carried two heavy pails of water from the pump to the house as if they weighed nothing, yanked open the door to the root cellar in a single violent gesture and led us down to the cold, dank land of canned goods lined up on shelves in front of earthen walls. She overcooked meat and vegetables until they were unrecognisable but still tasted pretty good. She was the only adult we knew who enjoyed sharing poop jokes. And she enchanted us with stories from her childhood. She learned how to walk on a wire. She and her brothers put sails on their sleds and were blown fast and hard on the frozen lake near the farm where she grew up. One day, she was told never to go near the well because if she did, the terrible creature called nøkken would rise up from its depths and drag her down to her death. Our grandmother, not yet our grandmother or even a mother, but still just a girl, walked straight to the well and leaned into it. She let her braids dangle into the hole, and she waited for the nøkken to come. She waited and she waited and she waited. She waited until she knew the grownups had been lying to her, and she skipped back to the house filled with secret knowledge. But our favourite story was the one about the minister. When she was eight, her mother died. The minister arrived to tend to his duties, and while he was there, he piously intoned that the death was God’s will. My grandmother stamped her foot and howled, ‘It is not! It is not!’ And she was glad she had done it, and Liv and I were glad, too.
Matilda Underdahl, known as Tillie to her friends, was the child of Norwegian immigrants who married another child of Norwegian immigrants, Lars Hustvedt, and from that union came my father, who grew up and married a Norwegian woman, Ester Vegan, my mother, who became an immigrant herself when she crossed the ocean to live with him in the United States. My mother did not know that her parents-in-law lived on a farm that was no longer a farm because it had been ruined by the Depression, that they lived without running water, and that they did not have electricity until my father put it in after he returned from fighting in the Second World War. She didn’t know that my grandmother left school after the second grade and my grandfather after the fourth, or that two wood stoves were all they had for heating during the brutal Minnesota winters. My father withheld all this from my mother. He let her discover it for herself. The reasons for his secrecy are buried with him.
My grandmother’s ghost haunts me. Now that I have reached the age she was when I was a small child, she returns to me in memory fragments. I have been thinking of the lost world of those Norwegian immigrants who arrived in the middle to the late nineteenth century to inhabit the prairie after the US–Dakota War of 1862. The Dakota were betrayed and starved by treaty and pushed off their land. That is the wide, long view of things, a view my grandmother never took, I’m sure, as she fought to keep her children fed and clothed after they lost most of their land to the bank, and her husband went to work on farms he didn’t own and then went west to work in a defence plant in Washington state during the war. At some point, my grandfather lost heart and retreated into himself. He didn’t have her strength. He didn’t have her—to use a world from another immigrant culture I married into—chutzpah.
My grandparents worked their heads off, but that didn’t change their lot. They were proud, but their pride only made their humiliation worse. America has long been a country of myth and mythmaking, of caricatures that still dominate the culture. Hard work, ingenuity, drive and guts will win the day. If anything, this myth has hardened. Nothing else is needed but an omnipotent ME. Over and over, I have heard CEOs and pop stars and celebrity athletes utter the bootstrap refrain: I never gave up on my dreams. I worked my way to the top. It’s a male myth mostly. Women have permission to lean in on their way up. Men are loved for punching, grabbing, fighting. The ruthless, supposedly ‘self-made’ man is touted as a hero, from Steve Jobs to the man who currently occupies the White House. But no one is self-made, no one. We are all born out of the bodies of women, and we are all dependent on others to survive. We all breathe the air and eat food and as social animals cannot do without other animals like us. My father ended up with a PhD. He went to college on the GI Bill. I ended up with a PhD. I had his example and the benefits of my whiteness and the middle-class status he and my mother gave to me. There is nothing wrong with hard work. The ugly side of the myth is that the poor deserve their poverty.
My grandfather’s politics leaned left, as did my parents, as do mine. My grandmother briefly bucked the family ideology by flirting with Eisenhower. I believe she actually voted for the Republican, but by the time I had reached consciousness, Ike was out of office and out of Tillie’s favour because whenever I took my seat over the stinky open hole in the outhouse beside the outdated Montgomery Ward catalogue that served us as toilet paper, there was his framed photograph hanging on the wall. In comparison to the venal huckster in office now, Dwight Eisenhower looks fairly benign, but my grandmother knew what to do with politicians who disappointed her. I strongly suggest we follow her example.